


Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin

by Beabaseball (beabaseball)



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate, DCU (Comics), Justice League - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet Ending, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Conspiracy, Crack Treated Seriously, Crossover, Dimension Travel, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Gun Violence, I Wrote This To Distress You, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Justice League (DCU) as Family, Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Other, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Psychological Trauma, Pym Particles, School Shootings, Shooting, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Tragedy, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21653224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beabaseball/pseuds/Beabaseball
Summary: They've survived the end of the world again, but something still doesn't feel right, and Natasha is going to find out why--starting with finding out who else seems to have tried to burrow through the Quantum Realm other than the Avengers.
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s)
Comments: 37
Kudos: 80





	1. Chapter 1

Things still weren’t okay. 

Even months after the fact, things still weren’t okay. 

Thor had returned to his people. Rhodey was Minister of Defense. The ones who died in the snap were back. Bucky hadn’t left Sam’s bedroom for weeks. These things all made sense, but still, as Natasha resumed her role in holding the Avengers and Shield somewhat together...

Things weren’t okay. And she was having trouble placing her finger exactly on why. 

...it would be easier if Clint were here, she thought. They had always been good at troubleshooting together. But Clint’s funeral had been a few days after Tony’s, and his family had quietly shuffled back into the countryside with the compensation money to curl around each other and lick their wounds. 

( _ “I already abandoned my family, Nat,” Clint said, trying to hold her from the edge of the cliff that she had planned to just walk off of without any time for him to argue. But he’d stayed fast as Ronin, and she’d spent the last few years trying to hold everyone together from an office. “They wouldn’t be proud of this. Those people? They’ll still be dead when this is over. You’re not the only one with red in the ledger anymore. You never were.” _

_ “You stay alive to make it up for them, then,” she’d hissed. “You have a family  _ to  _ make up with. Treasure it.”  _

_ “I have,” he said. “But you deserve that chance, too. To have a family.” _

_ “I  _ can’t _ ,” she said. ) _

_ (“You know that’s a lie,” he’d said. _ ) 

...it had been a long few months without him. 

And yet. Somehow she was certain: it wasn’t just mourning giving her this sense of wrongness. She’d mourned before, after all. 

She’d lost friends, before. 

Natasha had lost other agents on missions. People she’d worked with for years, gunned down in front of her in the line of duty. Spies who’d played cards with her and taught her the first things she knew outside the Red Room. People she’d been introduced to as safe, and they had been safe, showing her new ways to live, until they themselves didn’t live anymore. 

Natasha’s lost Coulson. They all had. They said he was just in vacation in Tahiti when they tried to fly off to get him medical treatment. She knew it was a lie to try and comfort them. Coulson would never hide from her if he’d survived. She’d lost Fury, running back to his office and finding it barren, and barren the next day, and the day after, and the day after that.

She’d lost her civilian neighbor in the snap, the neighbor who’d waved when they stepped out of their apartments together for morning commute, and once had asked Natasha to check on her cats while she was on a trip. They’d had dinner together afterwards, and then they’d just… talked a while. 

Natasha took the cat in after its poor owner turned to dust. The poor old thing died two years later. Kidney failure. Her neighbor returned to an empty apartment and a world that had moved on while she’d stayed young. Nat had long moved away. She thought about moving back, though, sometimes.

...there was always a wrongness in mourning. Thinking of something that the person would like, only to remember they were no longer there beside you. Forgetting details of memories and having no one around to remind you anymore. Spotting them in crowds. Dreams, where you forgot they were dead.

This was not that kind of strangeness. And she had no one to go over it with. Maybe she did, fuck, but… 

Cap was gone of his own choice. Tony was dead and stupid, and so was Clint. Thor was in New Asgard, trying to repair the lost trust he’d had with his people, and Bruce was… she hadn’t asked. They’d been together at Clint’s funeral, and quietly met eyes a few times in exhaustion, and they hadn’t spoken since. 

She thought he seemed happy. That was good. He wasn’t as anxious anymore, now that he’d been able to use the post-snap years to work out a relationship with himself, instead. She didn’t want to get in between that, and cause the work he and Hulk had put into merging personalities to go to waste while they were still recovering from the trauma of the snap.

She didn’t want him thinking he’d done anything wrong. He’d done everything he could, barr dying. 

And she was not about to even  _ hint  _ that he should’ve died. Not after one of their first conversations had been about his attempted suicides.

No. Banner was going to get some rest, and move on with his life, as far away from this political spy business as much as he needed to be. 

...There were others, she guessed, but they were all still returning from their disintegration. T’Challa. Fury and Maria. They had a lot on their plate to regain stability of their stations. And she also really did not want to go to Fury and Maria about this after… everything. 

She’d run Shield and kept things stable in their absence. She didn’t want to go back to taking orders just yet. And somehow, she knew, if she showed up at Shield now, even to just mention some concerns— it would be too easy to fall back into things as if the last half decade hadn’t happened. Of course she wanted to help make up for everything she’d done wrong, but right now she just… still needed some peace after it all. 

Peace that this nagging uncertainty was not allowing her to have. 

( _ “Why are you so determined to die?”  _

_ “ _ **_Why won’t you let me do this for you?_ ** ” _ ) _

The only other contacts she could think of who might be worth anything were the Pym Gang and whatever organization Dr. Strange was apparently in charge of. And she  _ really  _ did not want to deal with magic today. 

So after lying awake another long night, she kicked the sheets off her bed, packed up her bags, and bought a ticket to San Francisco. 

She was on X-Con’s Security Consulting by opening time that morning. 

—

Most of X-Con’s workforce hadn’t disappeared in the snap. None of it had, technically, though everyone had thought Scott Lang had been dusted along with the Pyms. 

A fourth of the world had woken up that day and had no one awake beside them. A fourth of the world had watched people crumble beside them. Most nobody had exactly gone to work those first few weeks, except to just look around, to talk to people, to try to figure out what was happening. There had been… quite a bit of looting at first, in the panic. Armageddon cults. Suicides.

Ironically, X-Con might’ve been one of the handful of jobs that had boosted business as people scrambled to protect themselves from the threats they  _ could  _ see, and trying to forget the one they’d never seen coming. Maybe having something to do had helped them through their grief, or maybe Natasha had just been around much more dour people than the too-perky front desk man who had taken one look at her and somehow decided she must know Scott. 

He wasn’t  _ wrong  _ she guessed, but. Well. It was definitely annoying, and it made her wonder what about her gave out  _ that  _ vibe, so she could immediately get rid of it. 

(that was a mean thought. She had no bad feelings towards Lang. He’d helped save all of them, multiple times it seemed. She just… was never really sure what to do once he was done being serious, and started trying to make jokes like they were casual friends. Not that they  _ weren’t  _ friends, she guessed, but-- she had met him three times, maybe. She did not know how to talk to a friendly work-associate she’d met a whole three times and who was more comfortable with casualness than she was. )

Luis didn't know her name, but after confirming she was here for Scott Lang, he got up and called into the back room behind the front desk and told him, "one of those scary ladies you keep finding is here to talk to you!"

At the speed Lang appeared, she wondered if he'd been expecting someone else. Then his face shifted through a few very fast, very open emotions, like surprise, relief, and then large and obvious anxiety.

This was why she hadn't wanted to bother Banner or Sam. Most of the time when she showed up at your door, something had gone wrong.

Sure enough, Scott was grabbing his coat and trying to punch out of work at the same time, saying, "Shit Luis, I'll be right back, hold down the fort--" while Luis gave him a large wink and double thumbs up.

Apparently being Ant Man was acceptable for leaving work early. She wondered if he was partly their marketing. Working with someone associated with the Avengers.

"What's up?" Scott asked, already halfway to the door with only one arm in his jacket, and Natasha still hadn't even had a chance to say 'hi.'

"Nothing," she said, but he was already headed out and holding the door behind him, so she let out a small sigh and headed out the door behind him. Maybe they could find a nice cafe. It was San Francisco after all.  _ Someone  _ had to make a good soy latte around here. "There's no emergency."

"No? No aliens, uh, bugs, zombies?" Scott said, starting walking down the street as soon as they were out of the building.

"No," she said, walking beside him. "Just checking in."

"Oh," he said, looking both deflated and relieved at the same time. "Well, uh, thanks? Are you  _ sure?  _ I mean I didn't realize -- wait. Am I still under observation? My house arrest was  _ totally paid off  _ and there was definitely--"

Natasha closed her eyes, put a hand on Scott's shoulder, and pulled him to face her. 

"No. Nothing is wrong. I came to say hi. Let's go find coffee since you're already signed out. I have been up for seven hours already and I could use the boost."

"Uh--" said Scott. "...okay."

They ended up in a Starbucks (one on every corner) and ordering a few minutes later, and Scott seemed to have had enough time to accept that he was not about to be spirited away from his life again by the Avengers to do some wildly illegal things and face the consequences afterwards alone. 

They both got mocha. A lot of mocha. Nat gave hers some raspberry syrup. She would buy.

"So, not that I don't appreciate it," Scott said once they got their drinks. They took a seat outside, leaning on the concrete partition between the Starbucks terrace and the sidewalk. "But why  _ are  _ you here? If you just. Really are checking in with people."

...hm. She supposed checking in did imply some measure of concern. 

She sipped some mocha and said, have you noticed anything strange lately?"

"Um," Scott said. "Stranger than usual?"

She shrugged. 

"I dunno. Like, what? I already guessed aliens," he said. "You're sure nothing's happening?"

She shook her head, crossing her arms and tapping her fingers on her to-go cup. "Just… a feeling. Nothing concrete."

...she felt a moment of good for Scott's daughter when he didn't try to immediately brush 'just a feeling' off. Instead he frowned down at his coffee and hmmed a bit more, and finally said, "I know Dr. Pym's been making a huff about something. Hope's been trying to tell him it's probably fine but he's been really focused on it for the last few weeks or so."

Natasha perked up, turning away from traffic to watch Scott instead. Maybe it wasn't the cause of her unease, but maybe it would be enough to calm it if she knew  _ something  _ that might be off. "What kind of thing?"

"Energy signatures of some kind," he said. "I dunno much about it. Hope says it's residue from uh. Time shenanigans. Like, you close a door it makes a sound. So we closed the door and we're still hearing the sound? Because sound waves move slower and… yeah."

"Do you know where the Pyms are?"

"Uh, yeah. Uh, do we need to go get a napkin? I can write you down the address--"

"I have GPS Scott. Just tell me where to look."

\--

Hank Pym was, indeed, deeply engrossed with something on the computer when she arrived at the newest penthouse. He didn’t even look up from the monitor when he said, “Lang, what have we  _ said  _ about bringing spies into my house?”

“Uh. Don’t?” said Scott. 

“ _ Correct.  _ So why is the SHIELD operative here?” 

“Uh?” said Scott. He looked around at several ants of unusual size milling about the edges of the room carrying things like socket wrenches and sometimes just lifting their front legs up to their antenna to groom them, almost like a cat would go at its ears with a paw. “Because the guard ants aren’t moving?”

“And  _ why is that?”  _

For how prepared he’d been when they entered the room, he completely missed the woman coming up behind him until she’d bonked him on the head with a manilla folder.

Janet van Dyne was still in slippers and a comfortable looking nightshirt and spotted pants and fully ignored her husband’s betrayed look. “I told the ants to be nice to guests, dear. Really. Ms Romanov used the particles already to get us back in the first place.”

“She is  _ also  _ a SHIELD spy!”

Natasha was not really offended as much as very tired watching this charade going on in front of her. “I was actually standing director for five years.”

“See?” said Janet, while Hank’s face said things were worse than he’d ever imagined. “At least be polite enough to ask why she’s come from the  _ other side of the country _ , Hank. Somehow, I think that’s probably a sign it’s something worth listening to.” 

“That’s just giving her more time to plant viruses on the air gap computers,” Hank said. “All SHIELD has wanted since they were invented was a way to use the particles, and they ended up all being Hydra Nazis, so forgive me if I’m a little uncomfortable letting them into my  _ sanctuary. _ ”

“SHIELD was Nazis?” Janet said.

“Yeah, unfortunately,” Natasha said. “I released the 2014 SHIELD leak. It was news for like a week and then everyone forgot. About the same as the Panama Papers.”

Janet sighed deeply and pulled out a little notebook, balancing it on the folder in the crook of her arm and produced a small pen. 

“There’s just so  _ much  _ to catch up on,” she lamented. 

Natasha tried to push back thoughts of a similar notebook left untouched on a nightstand, gathering dust in an empty apartment back east. 

Instead, Natasha cleared her throat. “Scott said you were finding some anomalies in the quantum realm?” 

Hank Pym leveled her a flat glare, and Janet reached passed him to pick up the mug of coffee on his desk and take a drink. “Something like that, yes. But with the quantum realm it’s hard to know what is or isn’t unusual. That said, it’s not something  _ I’ve  _ seen before, and trust me, honey, I’ve seen a lot more of the quantum realm than most.”

“And why are you interested?” Hank said, clearly somewhere between pouting and mad, but not enough so to interrupt his wife. 

“Bad feeling,” Natasha said, and by now she’d said it enough to feel a little stronger against Hank’s stare of incredulity. “You’re not wrong to be paranoid all the time. It’s useful in our businesses. Right now, my instincts tell me it’s time to be paranoid.” 

Maybe it was just that she’d been hoping for this for so long and there was  _ no way  _ it was real. Something had to be going wrong. 

But she wasn’t going to ignore it and then realize she’d been right the whole time.

Janet nodded understandingly, and Scott started slowly backing out of the room to make an escape from the aggressive man between them.

“You think it has anything to do with the time travel?” Natasha asked, coming a little closer now that at least one quantum physicist was on her side. 

“Not sure yet,” Janet said. 

“It’s not,” Hank grumbled, arms crossed. “Too different from anything before to be that.” 

“But it looks  _ similar  _ in that time travel also looked very different to what we’d seen before,” Janet added. “And that it seems to be wormholish. Which isn’t to say that’s what it is for  _ sure,  _ but it does indeed seem to look something like a tunnel.”

“Punching a hole through the quantum realm is  _ serious  _ and dangerous,” Hank grunted. “The fact we’re all alive instead of on the inside of a black hole is a goddamn miracle after all that tinkering.”

Natasha didn’t say that they weren’t all alive. 

She kept her eyes on Janet, instead. “Could it have been one of our failed attempts while we were first testing?” 

Janet hummed and Hank seemed to purse his lips to listen. 

“It could be, maybe,” she said. “...though we thought we’d already found those, which is why we’d mostly dismissed it. Also, the times don’t line up.”

“Times?” Natasha said. 

“It’s a little off, obviously,” Janet said. “The time conversion isn’t exactly reliable.”

“How long before the jump did you spend with the testing?” Hank said, looking up at her, still stone-faced and terse, but at least willing to go along with this, now, she supposed. 

“...the first was maybe a month before we did the operation. We had to fine tune and rewire a lot before the second try.”

“Well, dandy, so that’s about three hours back and still very much visible when we get the right coordinates for it. Just a mess of a twist in the whole thing.” 

Ah. Poor Lang. 

“I see,” Natasha said. “And this one is…?”

“This thing,” Hank said, “Looks like the ancient Egyptians did it in comparison. So somewhere between two or three years ago.”

Ah. 

Yeah. 

That was definitely not their tunnel. 

—

Natasha kept quiet about their discussion about time tunnels that had been created when no one should’ve rightly been around capable of doing so. However begrudgingly, Hank Pym had agreed to send her enough information to  _ identify  _ the sort of technology that might’ve had the potential to punch a hole in spacetime (it was scrawled on a napkin in sharpie, and Natasha decided this was the worst intel she’d ever had to decode) so that she could get to looking around businesses Pym didn’t have access to and see if anyone was up to something stupid. 

Losing half their people had definitely done a lot to cripple a lot of the larger giants and corporations, but if they hadn’t crumbled immediately, most of them had stuck it out. It wasn’t as if half the  _ money  _ in the universe had suddenly vanished, after all. 

So she looked around at the usual suspects. Stark’s competitors like Hammercorp. SHIELD’s off-system bunkers. Old KGB and affiliates. The French. 

She emerged a week later none the wiser, and unsure if she needed to personally rip through every nook and cranny of the world herself to find where this could be. It wasn’t as if it should be easy to hide once she knew to look for it. Large energy cost, pretty specific parts requirements. Some kind of connection enough to know  _ of  _ Pym Particles and try to emulate them. 

There really weren’t many places that weren’t crossed off pretty immediately, and by the time she’d narrowed down a couple of possibilities, she’d still end up spending more time on the flights to those remoter areas than she would actually scoping the place out and deciding this wasn’t it. 

So a week later, jetlagged to hell and in desperate need of a long bath, Natasha opened her phone after sleeping in, only to find a missed phone call from Pepper Potts, asking where she was. 

“FUCK,” said Natasha, throwing the comforter off her bed and scrambling up to get dressed for the day. 

She was three hours late for her coffee date when she finally arrived. 

Pepper had the face of a woman extremely used to dealing with someone who was chronically late when she opened the door to find Natasha on the doorstep, instead of in town at the cafe they’d planned to meet up at. 

Pepper was also merciful, and looked Natasha up and down one time, rolled her eyes, and said, “Come on and sit on the couch.” 

“Morgan’s out with Happy,” she said as she set a fresh mug of coffee and a glass of water in front of Natasha a few minutes later in the living room. She took an armchair off to the side with a large mug of tea. The room seemed large and empty with just the two of them in it. “So what happened to you?” 

Natasha rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand and leaned over to get the coffee off the table. “Ahh, I spent a week in building schematics and tax records trying to hunt down secret bases.”

“Ooh,” Pepper said. 

“Not really. Didn’t find anything. I mean, I found, you know, secret bases. Just not what I wanted inside them.” 

“Nukes?” Pepper drank her tea.

Natasha smiled a bit. “No, no nukes this time, so far.” 

“...so what  _ are  _ you looking for?” 

“Hank Pym to not nag me for talking to other people about it,” she said, still smiling. Not as if Pepper would leak anything. All the same, it was very sweet how Pepper reached over to pick up a remote on the arm of the chair and hear all the alarms and spy systems set up in the house quiet down.

“Yeah?” said Pepper, setting the remote down. 

Natasha had definitely not smiled as much in the last month as she had within five minutes in Pepper’s living room. “I dunno exactly. But it looks like sometime after the Incident, someone else might’ve been interested in the Quantum Realm. They’re anxious enough about it they’re letting me look into it.”

Pepper pursed her lips some, thinking on that. “Would some of Tony’s uh. His work help out with that? The schematics are… still on the computer, for designing everything.” 

Her eyes had flickered off to the side just for a moment before saying Tony’s name. As if trying to not bring him up, but knowing there wasn’t really a way to do that without also  _ doing  _ that. Bringing up something heavy for a comparably light tasks. But there was no way Natasha would’ve used the computers here and  _ not  _ known they were Tony’s. 

“...if that’s alright with you,” Natasha said softly. “I didn’t come to  _ ask  _ for that, you know.”

“I know,” Pepper said. She set her tea aside on the coffee table and sighed. “...I’ve been putting off going through his stuff.” 

“I understand.” 

Natasha said she understood, but she actually wasn’t entirely sure where this was going. 

“...maybe we can just… go into the lab, and if we find something useful, it’ll be. Easier. With someone else there.”

Oh. Okay. “...is that really how you wanna spend your afternoon today?” 

Pepper gave her a grin and narrowed her eyes. “I spent my afternoon in a lovely cafe being stood up, actually.”

…

“Okay,” Natasha said, standing. “Packing up the lab it is.”

—

Tony’s lab was not really in the house. 

It was under it. Accessible from an elevator in the garage.

Of course, they could access the computer system from the tables and screens upstairs, but the physical stuff was all kept in a fully furnished underground bunker, and nicely out of sight. It was also pretty firmly soundproof, so that the blaring heavy metal wouldn’t keep Pepper or Morgan up all night. 

Most of the lab was messy in a way Tony would claim was just an organization system too complicated for normal brains to understand, but right now it was just… dusty. The bright walls left a line behind when Natasha ran a finger over them, and the air felt stale and dirty in a way that maybe a warehouse would—but not an active garage, which should’ve smelled like gas, and filtered air, and microwaved leftovers. 

“God,” Pepper said, covering her nose with her palm. . She really hadn’t been down here in months. No one had. “It’ll take forever to look through this…”

Natasha nodded beside her, and quietly pulled out some latex gloves from her pockets. “Here.” 

Pepper looked at the gloves and back up at Natasha, and smiled a bit. “I thought this was casual wear?” 

“I come across crime scenes a lot in casual wear, too,” Natasha said, shrugging and trying to make it sound like a joke. Fortunately, Pepper snorted instead of being horrified. She guessed picking up after Tony for all those years probably felt like following a crime scene, too. 

They tugged on their disposable gloves and started to look through the dusty papers and parts with a thin layer of protection to ease the pain. 

While Natasha started looking through the paper blueprints in the filing cabinets, Pepper booted up the computer and asked it to sort through and find any files related or similar to their final time travel design. She looked slowly around the room again as it compiled. 

_ Ding ding  _ the computer went as it finished up. The compilation was… a lot larger than Pepper had expected, actually. She must’ve made a noise, because a few moments later Natasha was peering over her shoulder at the list of related data points. 

“This might take longer than I thought,” Pepper said, scrolling down as far as it would go. 

...the earliest related file was from four years ago. 

Natasha frowned, and reached over to tap it. 

_ [Access Restricted]  _ said the computer. 

Pepper reached over instead. 

_ [Access Restricted] _

Now Pepper was frowning, too.

“Pepper Potts,” she said, along with an access code that was hers alone. It gave her access to everything Tony made, just in case of emergencies.

_ [Access Restricted] _

Peppers eyes had narrowed greatly. 

“Show us a map of the lab with all restricted areas highlighted,” she said. 

Tony had been smart, but not very good at defending backdoors from exploitation. 

A map of the lab appeared, rendered in 3D, with several small things in the room highlighted in red—a safe where a replacement battery was, the Iron Man suits in the lockers along the wall, and—

A whole wall of red, in real life a spot where several large posters hung up, decorating the wall behind them. 

Both of them stared at it. 

“Ms Potts,” Natasha said, not looking away from the wall. “You don’t happen to know where a hacksaw would be, do you?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **TW for GUN VIOLENCE, SHOOTINGS, and ASSOCIATED VIOLENCE** in the first half of this chapter. No one is on-screen harmed, only some blood seen, and everyone is actually just fine okay because Wonder Woman is there. 
> 
> or, Wonder Woman meets a weird lady in the middle of giving terrorists swirlies.

Diana did not precisely consider herself the busiest person, but she did realize some of that was simply because she didn’t  _ tire  _ the way a lot of her friends did. Even Barry had a tendency to want to find a nice sunny spot in the office and curl up for a nap midday, while Diana curated a museum, worked with the UN, and also rushed out whenever a disaster was in reach— then drank and talked late into the night, go to sleep at three in the morning, and wake again once the sun reached her pillow with no loss of vigor. 

This was a weird little quirk of being a stranger in the world of men! There were many of them. Such as how quickly those in the world of men aged. Or fashion practicalities. Or how most people disagreed about being called warriors, even those who had trained from a young age in combative arts (which the world of men tended to be  _ more  _ likely to consider a warrior’s beginning path than most other paths).

This was all extremely exasperating at the best of times, but Diana had managed to start viewing their denial almost fondly, before gently telling them to shut up and be proud of being a warrior in the field of knowledge furtherment, healing, or other extraneous fields.

After all, if those things weren’t important, why would people keep trying to commit terrorist attacks near them?  _ Gods Damn.  _

That was why she was currently busy finding enough rebar to tie up hands and ankles once she incapacitated one of the various gun-wielding jerkbags that had decided they were going to spend today attacking a cultural arts center. 

She had come for a social visit for her most recent fundraising route to help underfunded community centers and better cater to their neighborhoods and connect them with sister centers in other countries or states. She’d been a good hour north by car when the news cycle came in that roughly ten people had marched in during a fundraising breakfast for the homeless. With lots of pancakes. Which meant lots of kids.

What did Dinah call these sorts of people? 

Ah yes. 

Jackasses. 

She had arrived ten minutes later, snatched as many guns from their hands as fast as she could, and broken them over her knee. 

But she might’ve missed someone, or they still had knives, or were just  _ large adults  _ and could take people hostage if left unsupervised. But if she could get rid of the guns first, she could take out a lot of the immediate collateral damage. 

She’d still seen a bloody smear in the entry hallway though, and so as she moved through the building like a hurricane, the first thing she did after grabbing guns was make sure people were  _ out of the way. _

Things were still in chaos—it always happened very fast, even for her, and even worse for the civilians—but her current order of business was to find and round up any of the terrorists she’d skimmed over before in favor of being a few moments closer to the next biggest threat. A few centimeters more in front of someone, acting as a human shield. 

She’d left two with a broken leg each and five others shoved through various areas of drywall to stop them running off too quick, but that still left three more somewhere in the building. 

One, she found in the bathroom, trying to clean his pants from their last encounter. She took a tip from some of Jon’s cartoons and left him on the ground in a toilet rim. 

As she stalked out of the restroom, a flash of light caught her attention. 

Diana whipped around to find a woman standing just a few short meters down the hall. She was in black tactical armor, not much unlike the gunmen, and there was no law enforcement badge or ranking on her chest. 

More importantly, upon seeing Diana, her response was not to show her badge, or even to express relief, or to report the situation. 

It was to place her hand on her sidearm. 

Diana slipped the lasso from her hip and when the gun moved out of the way it still wrapped tight around the woman’s arm and had enough purchase to fling her into a wall with a tug. 

“Drop your weapon!” Diana said, and was glad to see the gun very much dropped to the floor. “How many more are in your group?” 

“Group—?” She said. 

And through the lasso, Diana felt only genuine confusion. 

She frowned, but the lasso unwound itself from the startled woman’s arm. 

“You took me my surprise,” Diana said, snapping the lasso back like a yo-yo and securing it back at her side. “I apologize. There is still one active aggressor in the area. Unless you have a purpose, you should leave.”

“Aggressor?” The woman said, not yet back up on her feet, but hunched on the ground prepared to spring back up instead at a moment’s notice. 

Diana did not really stop frowning at that. 

“There is an active shooter, here,” she said. “The police will be storming shortly to collect the rest and rescue hostages, but there is still at least one—“

Diana watched as the woman’s eyes widened, drew up the gun, and fired it just to Diana’s left side. 

“—wouldn’t happen to be that one, right?” the woman said, as something hit the ground cursing. 

Diana turned to see a man at the end of the hall clutching his shoulder and twisting around to run. 

He didn’t have a hope of outrunning her. 

When she had him on the ground, wrapped in her lasso and under her boot, she turned back to the stranger in the hallway, who was still frozen in a crouch on the ground. 

Their eyes met once again. 

Hm. She was going to skip her 3pm coffee with Huyghe, wasn't she?

\--

Natasha stayed very much out of sight once the uniformed people came in. The stranger had called them police, but they were definitely not quite what Nat was used to. They had one shield up front and small firearms, sure, but there were no signs of riot gear or any heavier weaponry. 

A group split off to speak with the Extremely Tall woman, who was wearing both business slacks  _ and  _ what appeared to be a gold corset at the same time. She pointed towards several directions of the building and then towards the nearby men's room and down the hall to where what was apparently the final gunman was still lying on his face with the rope from hell around his middle.

Natasha didn't know what that thing was, but she would bet good money it was Asgardian for how blatantly magical it seemed.

The officers split into smaller groups and trotted off in the directions the giantess had indicated, saluting her, and didn't spare Natasha even a glance.

Natasha was quietly placing bets on if this world was run by magical giants. But somewhere, an ambulance's siren rolled closer in the distance, and she heard a child start to loudly cry. 

The giantess turned and looked at Natasha again, once the uniforms were busy, and said, "Come with me. I need to be with the children and make sure they're alright, but then we'll get you sorted out."

Nat was really not sure what that meant. 

...but hell. Where else was she going to go? 

When she'd stepped through a netherworld portal into an alternate dimension, a janitor's closet during a shooting event was not where she'd expected to land.

\--

The giantess led her away from the community center by wrapping her arm suddenly around Natasha's waist and taking to the air. 

Natasha decided this was a nightmare.

Far away from the ambulance's lights and huddles of kids outside on the lawn, Natasha was set down on an apartment balcony with hanging flower planters and a stone lawn decoration in the form of a gaggle of kittens. 

(A  _ weird  _ nightmare.)

The  _ glass  _ door opened with a finger print scan, which made Natasha wonder a little bit about that glass’s durability. She followed inside without any immediate death raining down from above, so she was definitely not interacting with a mad genius or something, but from what she’d seen at the community center, that wasn’t exactly saying things were any safer. 

Inside was a simple living room, if not a very clean one. Hardwood kitchenette and white carpet. Open flooring plan. A white chaise sofa had a bathrobe lain over its back. It faced a gas fireplace with various pottery on its mantle, and… a weapons rack full of spears and axes on the wall above it.

“Coffee or tea?” the giantess called, pausing just long enough to pull it over her bloody clothes before moving towards a small kitchenette to fill a kettle with water. 

“Thank you, either is fine,” Natasha said with no intention of drinking any of it. 

She was gestured down to the kitchenette’s little hardwood breakfast table, with two chairs set around it and Natasha sat, back in the chair nearest the balcony doors, which were still wide open. It brought a… pleasant breeze into the room. 

A mug of what smelled like jasmine tea was set in front of her, and the giantess sat across with another mug in her hands. It had a realistically painted dachshund wrapped around it. Natasha’s mug had an otter. 

She could see others stacked up in a windowed cabinet. One said ‘Queen of Everything.’ Another had a giraffe’s neck for a handle. 

The giantess took a deep sip out of her dachshund mug, set it down on the table, and said, “You seem confused.” 

Well.

“Yes,” Natasha said. She did not touch the otter mug. 

“Could you tell me why?” the giantess asked with an innocent cocked head and lazy blink. 

“A name could start,” Natasha said. 

It was a subtle body-language tell, but that was apparently a startling question. Judging how things  _ seemed  _ to be… at least cosmetically similar, she’d assumed introducing yourself was fairly expected in civilian circles, same as home. But the giantess hadn’t done that. And she had acted as if the police knew her, which was excusable, but then to take her to a private area and not introduce oneself to your ‘guest’ seemed unusual. 

But apparently it was surprising. Maybe surprising she didn’t know a name on sight? But even celebrities ran into people who didn’t recognize them. And this one hadn’t yet struck any of Natasha’s ‘narcissist’ bells to say she was the sort who  _ demanded  _ everyone know her. 

“You may call me Diana,” the giantess said, extending a hand across the table. 

“Natalie,” Natasha said as they shook. Diana’s skin was flawless. And warm. And calloused. 

“What were you doing at the community center, Natalie?” Diana asked.

Natasha debated for a fast moment what to answer. The situation had been  _ less  _ than idea, and everything would look suspect. “Looking for something of my friend’s.”

“Your friend’s?” Diana asked, taking a sip of her tea. “They lost something there?” 

“They think so,” said Natasha.

“Perhaps I could help you look.”

Natasha shook her head quickly. “It’s fine. I’ll keep looking on my own.”

“In an active crime scene?” Diana tilted her head again. “It would be simpler if I could tell the police what to look for, and return it to you.” 

Natasha did not like this world, and it’s apparent willingness to trust the police, and it’s strange openly-powered people working alongside them instead of accepting subterfuge and discretion as facts of life. 

“Ah, well,” she said, and began to fidget with the otter cup, moving it back and forth just a bit on the table, to try and seem a little less certain, and a little more ‘regular odd civilian’. “I don’t know exactly what he left.” 

“But it made you bring a deadly weapon into a place of safety,” Diana said. 

And it wasn’t that her warm tone was gone. It wasn’t that she had stopped holding her dachshund mug and tapping her fingers against it. It was just a change in the way she spoke. Maybe it was that it was the first thing Diana had said since they came into this innocuous-looking space which hadn’t been a question. 

It wasn’t really an accusation, either. It was just a statement. 

Natasha guessed she’d hoped for too much, thinking that perhaps someone who worked with law enforcement in active shooting zones wouldn’t think anything of someone carrying a gun. 

“I didn’t come to harm anyone,” Natasha said, straightening up and shedding what little anxious houseguest role she’d slipped into. 

“I know,” Diana said. Natasha frowned, narrowing her eyes. “If your intent had been to harm, I would not have treated you any different than those others.”

“And how would you know that?” 

“The Lasso of Hestia compels truth, and understanding.” Diana reached into her bathrobe and pulled out the yellow lasso she’d briefly tangled Nat up in, and just as quickly set it back down out of sight. “...besides, I have been in many fights. While I  _ was  _ startled, it does not take long to understand when someone is being genuinely aggressive, and when they are afraid.”

Natasha had  _ not  _ been afraid. And also this world was a nightmare. “So why did you bring me here?”

“To ask what you wanted,” Diana said, gesturing to the table where they were speaking. “And offer you tea.” 

...at which point, a long and steady look was given to the untouched mug of jasmine, now fully abandoned from Natasha’s hands. 

“...though I can see that it may not have been the most reassuring offer. I would drink it to show you, but I’m certain it would not convince you of much. So here.” Diana stood in a smooth movement, walking to a little pottery bowl on the kitchen counter, and pulling several crumpled green bills out of it. 

And then she held them out to Natasha.

“Take this. Go buy yourself a drink. Then, if you want to come back, you can. I’ll give you the key. You can go make a copy if you don’t trust it, there’s a key copier in the hardware store two blocks south, just please ask them to destroy this key afterwards so I don’t have too many unwanted house guests, haha.” 

Her laugh was like chimes. 

“...come back if you want help. Or you don’t have to. If you do turn to nefarious ends in your search, I’m afraid our next meeting will be under more unpleasant circumstances. But as long as you are honest and true, our arm is extended to you.” 

It was hard, for a moment, for Natasha to unstick her throat. Her mouth had gone dry, and she wondered if this is what lesser souls felt like when they met Nick for the first time. When he first reached out his hand, and proposed a team of Avengers. 

“What, exactly, would you be able to do to help me?” she finally managed to ask, and her voice was as deep and steady as it had always been. 

Diana smiled. 

“You are from far away, so let me tell you about the Justice League.”

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can you all fucking imagine the first time diana saw a giraffe


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Watchtower visit.

Diana was the one who brought up the words ‘travel between universes’ first, and Natalie seemed both very startled and, shortly after, very relieved. 

Diana supposed being in a world that had no concept of dimensional travel  _ would  _ make things more complicated if you were trying to explain a predicament to someone. Diana didn’t know a much about ‘science-based’ dimensional travel personally—she generally managed the mythical and magical issues— but she knew a bit was considering how Bruce complained each time it was mentioned, and how Clark never try to correct him with something more positive. It was one of the rare things those two were always in agreement with. That, and how they would still take interdimensional tomfoolery over dealing with the mythical things. 

( _ Boys _ , she thought, but with a lot of affection.)

Regardless, after a bit of explanation, it was clear that neither Diana nor Natalie were experts on dimensional travel, and so her mission was a bit of a shot in the dark. Diana’s best course for helping her would probably be to introduce her to some of the others whose talents lay more in the technological realm. 

So Diana walked Natalie to the back of a nice little diner and headed around back, to a spare utility closet. When they climbed in, there were a few loose AV cords on what seemed to be a lighting board. Making sure Natalie was inside and the door was closed, Diana plugged them in: red to orange, yellow to green, and blue to red. 

The closet-sized space lit up, and with a few blinks of an eye, their little utility closet’s walls were now clear, and opened up into the wide, white space that made up the Watchtower entry hall. 

The glass doors slid open on automatic hinges as a tinny little voice announce  _ Wonder Woman Oh 3, Guest.  _

It was a very sterile sort of room out of necessity--three large zeta pods in a cavernous, vatant room, in case there were some need for mass transport-- but Clark had tried to brighten it up with a small pot of tiger lillies on a little desk underneath the ‘<\- Medical Wing’ and ‘Common Area (Rest Rooms) ->’ signs on the opposite wall. It needed its own personal sunlamp to grow up here, but overall it seemed quite healthy.

Natalie moved out of the zeta tube a few steps behind her, looking cautiously around their new surroundings. It took her a moment between spotting one of the outward facing windows along the wall and commenting on what was outside it. 

“...are we in space,” Natalie asked, very calm. 

“Yes!” said Diana, smiling. “It is legally international territory and so we are not beholden to any one nation, besides those of us who are ambassadors.”

Natalie had  _ quite  _ a face for that one. 

She reminded Diana of Bruce. She was cute when disgruntled or surprised. Diana had no doubt they would have gotten into an immediate fight if Natalie had somehow come across him first instead. But it would probably have been a  _ great  _ fight, provided someone intervened before anyone’s pride got too bruised. 

“Come,” Diana said, waving her along. “I will give you a short tour. This is where we are most likely to find someone available to help, or contact someone.” 

“Your headquarters is in space,” Natalie said. “Would you happen to know anyone named Thor?” 

Diana looked back at her, thoughtful. “Mm? The God of Thunder? We did meet briefly in World War Two after Hitler had summoned and brainwashed him, but the last I knew he’d gone to parlay with his father and brother in Hell, and so I wouldn’t know how to go about contacting him.”

Natalie shook her head quickly. “That’s fine. I was just wondering.” 

They continued on in the ‘common area’ direction, which would of course  _ eventually  _ loop back around to reach the medical areas—the Watchtower’s gravity came from being shaped like a ring and slowly spinning around the central structure—but first it would bring them to the cafeteria.

The cafeteria was the unofficial meeting room. If you had something that didn’t need soundproofing or a vote, most people would talk about it there. It also had food, so it was indeed an extremely popular hangout place, even after poor Barry had been banned due to limited reserve.

While Diana looked around for a good table choice, she let Natalie have a few minutes to case the area. Long rectangle tables, mostly benches instead of chairs, a line in front of an ordering window and a conveyor belt for dirty dishes afterwards. Like a roadside foodvan, its menu was off to the side, and the soup of the day was always whatever needed to be gotten rid of from the meal prior. 

Diana was delighted to notice today’s special was chili, and shortly after finally spotted some of the people she’d been looking for. 

“Ah! There we are,” she said, to call Natalie’s attention, and then made a twisty way through the cafeteria tables the far side of the room and greeted the two occupants sitting alone at the end of the row with a smile. “Atom, Blue Beetle, might I interrupt your meal for a moment?” 

Diana did not know Blue Beetle well, but Atom was a familiar face up in the Watchtower, maintaining the reactors and zeta beams. He was the one who gave a wave as she came in, while Blue Beetle mostly nodded and glanced at Natalie behind her. 

“Yeah, Wonder Woman, is something happening?” said Atom. 

“A bit,” she said. “Would either of you be able to help with old wormholes?” 

The two men glanced at each other. Atom said, “Well, depending what it is, we can give it a shot, sure. Does it have to do with your friend there?” 

Diana nodded. “Yes. She’s come from a different dimension after learning a wormhole had previously been opened here, and is trying to discover why.” 

Blue Beetle frowned a little bit, but mostly in a thoughtful way. “I can ask Booster if he might’ve made any trips in or out if we know which dimension it might be?” 

Diana really hoped it wouldn’t come to talking to Booster, but nodded anyway. 

“Do we have any data sets?” Atom asked. 

“I can get some from my universe,” Natalie said.

Atom sat up a little straighter. “You can go back and forth of your own will? I mean-- well, I guess I assumed being stuck here would be the problem?”

There was just the slightest bit of shrinking back from Natalie under the scrutiny. Diana wondered how common she’d thought intentional dimensional travel was, when Natalie’s world had only just discovered it at all.

“It’s limited,” Natalie said after a moment. “But going and bringing back some papers won’t be a problem.” 

“Does it have to do with your suit?” Beetle asked. “The tech on that belt alone looks  _ amazing _ .” 

Natalie put her hand over the small compartment on her belt. “That’s classified.” 

“Everything is,” Atom said, waving a hand. 

“...And I wouldn’t personally be able to explain it. I didn’t make it myself.” 

Atom deflated a little more definitively. As did Beetle. 

Diana clapped her hands to break up what was surely going to soon be a train wreck. “Alright, thank you two! We’ll work on getting you some more information and maybe it’ll be something non threatening and fun for once.” 

Beetle laughed a little. “Yeah, I’d love some normal interdimensional physics for once.” 

Diana smiled at them again and waved, and turned to lead Natalie back out of the bustling cafeteria. “Now, for you, if you’re going to jump back, let’s have you on solid Earth, first.”

Diana wasn’t exactly clear on the rules of it all, but Natalie seemed to grow a little wide-eyed upon coming to a similar conclusion: maybe doing an interdimensional jump while in space without a spacesuit or ship was a bad plan. 

“Good plan,” Natalie said, and started walking with a bit more speed and purpose back towards the zeta platforms. 

They were midway back through the common areas when the zeta announcement went off again. 

_ Nightwing, B Oh One. Robin, B Fifty-four. _

For a moment, Diana paused, making sure she’d heard alright, and then she was walking all the faster towards the zeta beams, passing Natalie again at speed. 

“Nightwing?” She called, before even passing the threshold into the zeta room. 

Normally, she’d have used his name. He’d grown up under her watch and called her Auntie when he’d been little--but she had a guest, and so there were no familial names. All the same, it was him: mask on, yes, but in a T-shirt and sweats, with a rolling suitcase at his side and a plainclothes bundle of a child hanging onto Nightwing’s back, face shoved into his shoulder. 

It wasn’t unusual for Nightwing to be in the Watchtower. 

It  _ was  _ unusual for Robin. 

Nightwing looked up at her call and didn’t quite manage a smile, even though he looked uninjured. Robin did not look up. “Hey, Di. Everything okay?” 

“I hope so,” she said, and make a pointed glance at the suitcase, not at the child hiding in a piggy back. “Everything okay?” 

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Nightwing said in a voice that was very clear and steady, and definitely meant he was lying because he just didn’t want to get into it. “B’s in a mood lately, that’s all. So we’re going to go visit Kori and Raven for a few weeks ‘til he calms down.”

Diana nodded, frowning in sympathy. “I’ll send Clark by to talk with him, alright?”

“It’s fine,” he said. 

Diana ignored the dismissal, moving forward instead to give Nightwing a forehead kiss and Robin a very brief pat on the head. His response was a small hiss, but she would take it. 

They said a brief recur of ‘goodbye’s and pointed ‘take care’s before Nightwing entered the next zeta over, and set it to drop them down in California. 

Diana watched them go, disappearing into beams of light. The whole conversation couldn’t have been longer than a minute or two.

Natalie spoke again from the doorway, having simply watched without questions or introductions. 

“You all usually use teleporters for vacations?” 

Diana had a feeling that wasn’t the real question being asked, but she pulled back up her smile and said, “No. But, once in a while, I suppose I’ll allow it. Now, come, let’s get you home.”

—

...Natasha appeared back on their teleport pad, a few seconds removed from her first disappearing. 

She came back looking the same, physically—but she brought with her a wild and alarming energy from the moment she warped in, already half walking off the platform towards them. 

“Pepper, Bruce, I’m gonna need a  _ lot  _ more help than I thought, here.”

—


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> chapter i had to get through to just set some stuff up my dudes

Firstly, they noted that Natasha had returned from ‘the other side’ at almost the same exact second she’d left, much like time travel. 

So, they were not in an especially fast hurry to send her back, partly because they needed some time to talk things over and gather up the files on the closed up wormhole they’d found, and also because it’d be something to see if she’d return back almost the moment she left again, or if that universe simply hurtled on for hours to their minutes. If that were the case, then there was no way they would be able to send Natasha back in a ‘reasonable amount of time’ anyway, and so they just… would take a day.

To debrief. To rest. And to prepare for the return trip. 

...Pepper had been the one to contact Bruce to set up the initial jump. He’d operated the machinery before, after all, and four eyes were better than two when waiting for something to go wrong. 

They hadn’t really addressed anything the first time they’d been messing around with time travel, and they didn’t really address anything this time, either. Maybe it could be let unsaid. Maybe they could just be friends again. Just fond friends, instead of a strange panicked connection in a moment of weakness. 

Because right now, she really needed her friend Bruce. 

“I literally saw a neon green pinhead crush up a box of oreos and start picking it up with his fingers like spilled pixie stick,” she said, lying on her back on Bucky’s bed, forcibly inducing socialization. “Bruce is going to be the least conspicuous person if that’s normal over there.”

Bucky nodded a little bit, which was about as good a response as she could hope for right now. He was listening and responding, which was better than some days. He’d occasionally have a day when he would talk and respond a bit more animatedly, but it was a slow-going process to get him to that. 

He’d spoken a little bit after Steve… returned. Just enough to refuse T’challa’s invite back to Wakanda. He wanted to stay near Steve’s nursing home. About twice a week, she or Sam or Sharon would walk him over and they’d have a proper visit. They’d show up more often if they had to, but giving Bucky a day or two a week to look forward to helped. He spent most of his time hiding in Sam’s spare room in the dark, sometimes watching tv, but getting him out twice a week with plenty of warning seemed to be good for him. 

Right now, the tv was off, and Bucky was staring at his fishtank instead. Sam had set it up for him with a little group of neon tetras and told Bucky his job was to feed them twice a day. Once in the morning. Once at night. They were speedy little fish, and their twenty gallon tank gave them a lot of room to move around. Something for Bucky to watch that wasn’t tv. 

There was a checklist pinned in the wall beside it with the days of the week, and a sharpie hanging onto the top so that two check marks could be placed for each feeding. Something to keep time with. Show time was still moving. 

Natasha and Bucky got along better, but that didn’t mean that Sam wasn’t pulling out all his tricks to try and help Steve’s friend. Even if he did give all the fish names like ‘Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Floppy,’ and ‘Bullshitter.’

...they’d tried to invite Bucky to the veteran group therapy sessions, but he’d just remained firmly under his blankets in bed, and refused to move. 

So Natasha brought the sessions to him. Even if it was mostly just her telling him about how she’d missed a lunch date with Pepper and accidentally ended up finding a secret room beneath her house’s garage. Also, she’d seen a very cute shitzu the other day. Wouldn’t he like to see a picture?

(He did look at the picture, and smiled a little bit, but soon went back to mostly sitting in the dark staring at the walls.)

It wasn’t always much, but it was something. Maybe if they kept him alive long enough he could… find something else to keep living for. 

It was hard, ripping away from all of your past. She knew that. You had to keep living to do it, though. 

So for now, she just told him about her visit to the otherworld and how mutants were apparently the big law enforcement, and how she would bring him a souvenir next time. 

“I bet beetle man has a lot of toys modeled after him,” she said. “Maybe I’ll get you a suit for some pjs or something.” 

Bucky made a little huff of amusement, probably. Natasha stretched her arms up above her on the bed. “Have you had any lunch yet? I still have a few hours before I head back. And I’m sure Sam made  _ plenty  _ for two.” 

Sam, just having opened the door with one plate in hand, scowled an closed the door again. 

“ _ Please  _ stop breaking in through his window?” Came muffled from the other side of the door. 

“He lets me in!” Natasha called back. 

And they got a faint smile out of him once again. 

—

She stole some lunch from Sam’s house, and also some cupcakes he’d stress-bake and not yet frosted, delivering them to Pepper and Bruce when they reunited at the Compound. The building had been widely damaged during the second invasion, and there was now a very large and unnatural chasm behind it, but it was where all their technology had been to start time travel. That made it the easiest place to convert that technology, now that it’d been cleaned up and the windows repaired over the four months since the Blip. 

Aside from Tony, Bruce knew the most about scientific time-space manipulation. If they were going to scientifically track down the old rift, they’d need someone who could properly speak nerd. While Pepper  _ understood  _ nerd plenty (more than Natasha generally did) she hadn’t been involved in building their old portal and wouldn’t know the details of things like Bruce did. She also had a kid to look after if something were to go wrong over there. 

So while Natasha and Bruce were going to take the jump this time, Pepper had called in a Stark intern who had work experience with Drs. Foster and Selvig. Apparently, she had experience with stressful, top-secret workplace incidents, and was eager to earn some bonus credit, as she’d missed five years worth of college while being Snapped. 

When Natasha arrived, suited up and with a satchel to hold some civilian clothes and necessities for them both, since they were guessing this trip might be a little longer than her previous one. 

Sadly, the cupcakes would have to be delivered prior to jump. They weren’t sure how exposed food would fair. At least the intern seemed excited.

“Okay,” Pepper said, standing over an electronic hologram of the blueprints and datasheets they’d printed out for transport. “If you arrive over there and it’s a different time from before, we’re going to have to try and adjust when the tunnel arrived to the time difference. So if it’s a day later when you arrive, the tunnel may have drilled into that world a day extra for each second it’s been here. So if it’s been exactly five years, that would be…”

“Approximately 115 trillion, 106 billion, 418 million 250 thousand days,” said FRIDAY. “Or 315 billion, 576 million, 50 thousand, 34 years, counting leap years.”

Oh boy. 

“Thank you,” Pepper said. Bruce took a big gulp beside her. “So the time difference between our five-ish years and their time is  _ very important  _ to take into consideration, since their earth may not have even  _ existed  _ when the tunnel occurred.” 

“So what will we do if that is the case?” Natasha asked, voice low. 

“We’d probably have to give up on finding out why the tunnel was made,” Bruce said, almost apologetic sounding. “If anything, uh… it might be the reason why Tony was so reluctant to help out at first. With the time travel.”

Natasha glanced back at Pepper, whose expression had slackened some. 

“...It would be something he’d probably try,” she said. “And then if it’d failed and he just wound up at where earth  _ would’ve  _ been, if it’d existed back then…”

...Natasha nodded back. 

The Iron Man suit would maybe have save him. But that would’ve… definitely been a good reason to try and warn them away from any attempts. 

...and a reason to try and save them, she guessed. 

“Well,” she said. “If that is the case, then.. we will at least know for more certain.”

Pepper looked a little bit more settled at that.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s get you two through.”

—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i made an earnest attempt to do the math and so No One Should Criticize Me. :(


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> IT’S SUPER TUESDAY GO CHECK IF YOUR STATE IS VOTING TODAY.

Bruce _definitely_ didn’t panic a little bit when he woke up the next day. 

That was a lie. He’d definitely panicked a little bit when he woke up to a blank and unfamiliar room, more bare than a hotel room and leaning closer to the metal sterility of a hospital. 

He couldn’t be blamed too much for panicking. He had a lot of bad experiences with waking up in unfamiliar places not remembering exactly what happened before bed. 

He _did_ remember what happened this time, yes, but not quite soon enough to get rid of that split-moment panic kick. 

...they had come though the portal to meet Diana, who was as tall as he was and just about as well muscled, which was an weirdly uncomfortable thought he’d tried not to linger on. He knew Valkyrie was well muscled and supernaturally strong, but this was a good few steps above even her, and it was just… 

A very very clear reminder that they were on a different planet now. 

And he had made his feelings on different planets very clear, he’d thought. He’d had a couple good years to readjust to Earth, and the little weird differences on this place were definitely enough to throw him off. 

Especially when they were now officially off planet. If he went to the hallway outside and looked out the window, he’d see either stars or the Earth spinning by below. 

It was definitely uncomfortable and not what he’d been hoping to deal with today. Yesterday. The future, upcoming days. 

He was _also_ guessing that Natasha had been over-exaggerating how used to green people this world was, because when they’d been introduced to the two scientists who were going to help look things over, they’d both stared bug-eyed at him, and he’d remembered again that he didn’t have internet fame to smooth his way here. 

...so even though he pretty quickly shook off the panic of awakening in a new place, it wasn’t exactly _relief_ that he felt once it was all done and over with. 

He pushed himself up off the bed (which… he was surprised was a queen size. On a space ship. It meant he could actually _lie down_ , so he wasn’t exactly complaining, but he was still very much surprised.) and did what he could to clean himself up for… what he assumed was a new day. 

It might’ve been three am. But he had no clock in the room. And there was no FRIDAY to talk to. And he couldn’t really trust his watch’s time anymore, since it was set to a satellite that didn’t exist here, with no Stark Industries to put it up in the air. 

He let out a long breath and tugged on his shirt from the day before and a fresh pair of pants, and wiped his glasses of smudge marks. 

Outside the room there was a community restroom sign pointing down the hall, where he washed his face and ran his comb though his hair before making his shuffling way out of the ‘dorms’ and into the ‘communal’ areas of the satellite. 

There weren’t many people around, not that there had been a hoard of people the day before. It did make him wonder how many people might be _in_ this organization, but considering a dining hall, he was sure he hadn’t seen nearly half of them. 

...which was definitely kind of disconcerting. Not that they might be _bad_ people, but… he remembered the hoard of people who’d come to face up against Thanos that last time. A couple of aliens, a maybe ten-ish mutants, super soldiers, and regular humans with suits, a few wizards, and then the army of an entire nation.

...if they left a couple Wakandan soldiers behind, he thought they might all be able to fit into the mess hall down here. And that was mostly what gave him such a sense of vertigo at the size of the place. Maybe the architect wasn’t _planning_ to have that amount of people inside at all times, but it had definitely been made with the space to do it. 

He was kind of grateful the place was essentially a single large loop, because it was hard to get lost, even if he may have taken the long way around accidentally. But as long as he kept walking forward, he would eventually find the room they’d been shown the night before where Atom and Blue Beetle were planning to use for research. 

It reminded him some of the university’s research library, full of little rooms to close the door and work privately in. Not that this place was _full_ of little rooms—but they were still here and there, some with computers attached into the walls, and with work tables, where someone could presumably talk or tinker in privacy for a while, and a large widow to look out into the hall from, and presumably to let others know the room was claimed. 

When he finally found the one he recognized from the night before (room 1E, it said) he found it was already occupied. 

It was Diana who spotted Bruce outside first, and left a baleful-seeming conversation between the one who’d been introduced to him as Blue Beetle last night, and a figure dressed in dark metallic fabric and seemed to have horns on his head. 

“You’re up early!” Diana said, opening the door wide and ushering him in.

“I am?” Bruce said, shuffling in as much as his large gait could make a shuffle. “What’s going on?” 

“They’re just bargaining down to being able to use some of the deeper computer systems,” she said, which was sort of comforting, if not still concerning. 

“Bargaining down…?” He prompted, and Diana picked it right up. 

“Looking for a portal in the last decade or so isn’t going to be helped by the criminal database or the alert systems or anything, but because it _is_ data picked up over some major events it’s not exactly on the basics system,” she said, smiling. “So they’ve been at it for about ten minutes now. They’ll probably agree in an hour or Beetle will ask again later.”

“So, uh,” Bruce said, glancing over the arguing group again. “He’s in charge of computers, here?” 

He’d thought that was Atom, maybe, from how they’d introduced him as working on the Watchtower the night before and his and Bettle’s being experienced in extradimensional work, but he guessed maybe there were… a lot more people than he was used to. And there was no longer just him and Tony, being the ones who were ‘the science’ guys, not just Tony who was in charge of all things electronic, the only one really making AIs an suits and...

“Ah, yes! Sort of,” Diana wrapped a very buff arm around his considerable shoulders and started to walk him over to the group, much to his horror. 

They interrupted the argument mid-word (Beetle’s words) for Diana to say, “Bruce, Batman. Batman, this is Bruce, one of our visitors!” 

‘Batman’ turned to look at Bruce with an absolutely blank expression, which did not seem to surprise anyone in the room at all. 

“We’ll discuss information sharing in a minute,” Batman said in Bruce’s direction, then turned back to Blue Beetle. “You can write an application for more access when you prove you _need_ more access.” 

“We’Re going to MisS SomEThInG!” Beetle said, as Batman tried to exit the conversation by physically heading for the doorway. 

“You claim the portal on your end shows no certain sign of having made it through; that it collapsed midway. Why do you think there’s something to be found on this end?” Batman said, ignoring Beetle. 

“Uh,” Bruce said. 

“No, you get the fun mysteries when you’ve spoken to Nightwing and apologized.” Diana had very suddenly lost contact with Bruce’s shoulder and was instead starting to pull Batman out of the door, while he seemed to be digging his heels into the floor fairly… inefficiently, as he slid by. “If they’re stuck and need help, _then_ you can help.” 

“Make him give us full access, Diana!” Beetle called out behind them. “It’s not like it’ll show something Booster can’t have already told me!” 

“I’m sure you’ll do great!” Diana called back, waving. “Do not work each other to death!”

And then, she pulled Batman out through the door and they were shut off from the noise outside. Through the window, Bruce could still see them standing there and talking now that they were slightly away from an audience—Batman’s shoulder had been released—and they both looked… a little less cheery than before, which was both surprisingly for the upbeat Diana, and also not great, since Batman already hadn’t been looking too pleased anyway with them. 

“Don’t worry about them,” came a voice, and Bruce jumped at a hand on his shoulder to spin around and see Atom reaching up to try and reassure him. “That group is always a little eccentric.” 

“That group?” Bruce asked, almost scared of an answer.

“You met Superman yet?” Atom asked, pulling his hand back and instead moving back to the little work table, gesturing for Bruce to come on along with him. “No? Well. Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman sort of founded everything. World’s Finest. And they’ve sort of gotten to the point where they don’t have a self-conscious bone in their body, so don’t let them bother you. They’re generally trying to help.” 

“Batman is never trying to help,” Blue Beetle said.

“Batman has a different idea about what help looks like,” Atom agreed, smiling a little. “But don’t let it bother you. Wonder Woman and Superman keep him in check. Now, is Natalie up yet?” 

“Not, uh, that I know of,” Bruce said. “Though usually she’s up a little earlier than me.”

“Well, maybe she got breakfast first,” said Atom. “Have you eaten?” 

“Not since coming here.”

“We can fill on you in what we’ve got set up so far and go see if we can find Natalie while getting you some food, then,” said Beetle, huffing and relaxing a little bit now, rolling one of his shoulders and get ridding of an audible crick in his neck. “Come on. It ain’t a restaurant, but it’s pretty good.”

—

  
  


In the end, they were not being given full access to the computers, but they had enough that when Atom and Beetle got the data input finally, they were able to produce a hologram very much similar to the ones Tony used to use for blueprints. 

Natasha had appeared sometime after lunch (which was difficult to tell when you were in space without day and night) with an external harddrive and paper printouts of the data it contained. It was good she'd brought them, as Beetle tearfully explained, Batman would eat them alive if they plugged in a foreign USB and ended up giving the satellite malware.

(The USB was confiscated to be returned to Earth and its own proper universe next time they went back.)

So while Beetle rested his emotionally battered morning, Atom took up starting to mock up the machines Pepper and Natasha had found in the hidden second lab. 

While Natasha was able to largely describe things, Atom… asked Bruce to help put things together with him. And they brought out the screws and wires and code and started to make little test models to compare their computer results with, and it was… nice.

...the last few years with Tony alive and Bruce finding himself had been… lonely. 

For a little while, back in 2012, it'd almost seemed like he might start making a friend. They'd even sort of connected some, a bit, before the Ultron disaster, and going and getting shot into space, losing a few years of his memories, and…

Well.

When Tony had come back down from space and half the universe was missing, they didn't exactly talk much. 

So it was a little weird. Kind of deja vu, even, to be working with another person on these sorts of blueprints again. Being able to help decipher the scrawl or abbreviations that didn't translate or make sense in a world without cold fusion.

...it was nice.

It hurt a bit. In the not nice way. 

...maybe he was just mourning the years that he and Tony might've been able to have as friends, if they'd ever started talking again. If he'd not missed his chance. He hadn't realized the door would close so quickly. 

...He hadn't fully asked Natasha why they were doing this. Batman had been right, there wasn't really any reason to suspect something was wrong. Maybe Tony had just tried time travel before in desperation. Maybe he'd wanted to wall away that failure. Call it another mistake. 

...but maybe if they could just find out what Tony had been doing, maybe it would just… be like solving a puzzle. Maybe it _had_ just been a failure and sealed away. Maybe there was no point, whether they found out when or why the tunnel had been made or not. 

Maybe it was just… one last problem Tony had left behind, and if they could solve it, maybe it would be some kind of resolution.

Yeah, maybe they were looking for a unicorn, or a miracle, or an end of the earth Tony had just fallen off of, as if they could simply pull him back up into their lives with enough determination and rope. 

...and while logically, Bruce knew that wasn't going to be what they found at the end of this, it was still a nice thought.

Maybe this would give some resolution to it all.

\--

Pepper was in the basement again. 

She'd been coming down here a lot, the last day or two. 

Peter was upstairs watching Morgan and trying to sneak ice cream from the freezer without the cameras catching him. He was failing. But it let her know things were okay upstairs. That she could call up a screen and glance over to see neither of them were about to blow away in the wind. 

...but she still was in the basement, instead of up there with them, scolding them into a glass of juice if they needed sugar so much. 

The hidden room she and Natasha had found just a few days ago was like an unpleasant intruder in her house. She'd said _no more surprises. No more secrets._ And Tony had kept that promise for so long.

...or so she thought, apparently. 

And that… stung. 

…

It was easy to be mad at Tony. Be mad at him leaving them. Mad at how he'd gone. Mad to raise her daughter as a single mother and find out that there were _still_ secrets she’d never heard from him.

They hadn’t done an especially hard sweep of the area when they’d first discovered it. Pepper had been in the middle of hard sweeps before, and that had definitely not been what happened. 

It was hard to ransack a place that seemed so familiar in its design and clutter. A place she sort of understood had… not been touched by anyone since Tony, until they’d arrived, months too late and no one left to ask questions to. 

So she… asked questions and tried to find her own answers. Not something exactly outside her expertise, except that she was still waking up each morning wondering if the last few months had been a dream. 

The room they’d opened up was… not as big as Tony’s usual lab. FRIDAY reported that any footage of the wall being erected and anything put inside it that’d been shot had been erased for quite a while now. And Tony _didn’t_ delete footage. But who else could have the authority to tell FRIDAY to do something like that and listen?

It’s computer component was up by the far wall, directly across from the spindle-wheel like machine that seemed to be the culprit for the interdimensional jumps. It was what Natasha and the Pyms had used as a blueprint to modify their own jumps to go… sideways, rather than back or forth. 

Then, unexplained and unfamiliar on the back wall, was a… well…

...it seemed to be a cage. Like a large birdcage, with a taser on the side and a strange sort of bar that led up to the second strange object in the room. 

It was a fish tank. A fairly large one, at that. It seemed big enough to hold a good three hundred gallons of bright green liquid, but yet nothing swam in it. There was no substrate, no filter, no background paper or plants or even a fake treasure chest inside to decorate the tank. Just luminous, green liquid, which moved as easily as water rippled when someone walked in, but didn’t really splash when disturbed, and didn’t seem to have much of an order or evaporate much in the underground sealed chamber. 

...they had already tested it, of course. It had come back as… mostly made up of water. But something else inside it was unknown, and while it didn’t seem to do Scott any harm when he spilled one of the vials on his wrist, Pepper was still going to be wearing rubber gloves an goggles when she dipped an empty beaker of her own in the water and sealed it up. 

Maybe they had no idea what this new substance was, but with a group of scientists from another world helping them? Maybe they could find the answer to what her husband had been hiding all these years, right underneath her house. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, IT’S SUPER TUESDAY GO CHECK IF YOUR STATE IS VOTING TODAY
> 
> The more i think about this Fic the more i’m like “why did i think i could ever do this and be peppy” i need to figure out a happy ending


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> beta'd by unspokenhatred on tumblr

The majority of the first day was spent organizing their data and transferring it onto the Watchtower’s computers. They made up an (incomplete) timeline of the time span they estimated the breach had been made during, and… 

Then they were just sort of letting the computer do a casual search of energy signatures at all similar to when Natasha and Bruce popped between dimensions. It wasn’t an especially large signal and their systems hadn’t been quite as robust five years ago (according to Atom) but there were still… quite a variety of ‘pings’ on the scanner, unfortunately, as it seemed zeta technology and something called a ‘boom tube’ sometimes made a similar sort of energy signature. 

So, first, they had to go through and… cross off anything that they had an explanation for. Starting with zeta beams, boom tubes, and any sort of ‘villain attack’ (Blue’s words) which involved portals. There were more of those than Bruce was honestly comfortable with, but at least it made sense why this world seemed to have such otherwise inexplicably familiarity with portals and parallel dimensions.

The zero-second conversion rate was convenient in narrowing down the field, since Natasha and Bruce could essentially keep moment-to-moment interaction between world. Unfortunately, it also meant they essentially worked double-shift, living two days in one until one world could produce some information, relaying it, waiting for the next response, only to returning to the same moment they’d just left, starting all over again. 

It was… disorienting, to say the least, and meant that by the second day of research in the Watchtower, they were already having to catch themselves not calling it the third or fourth day when talking about it. 

So, for them, it had felt like things were taking a relatively long time, but as far as Atom and Blue Beetle were concerned, things had escalated fairly quickly with the arrival of a glowing green substance. 

From the zeta room, Bruce had walked in carrying it in a small see-through container. He’d passed Diana and a tall man in red and blue, who’d zipped up to the ceiling upon spotting the little glowing vial. 

Bruce stopped in his spot, worried he’d done something wrong and knowing it was definitely the green this time. Then, Diana had leaned in to peer at the vial, laughed, and said, “Come down, Kal, it’s fine.” 

And then ‘Kal’ slowly floated back down to the floor, and cautiously took a few steps of his own to peer at the glowing container. 

“Oh. Phew. Okay. I thought I’d really pissed someone off this time, haha,” he said, and turned towards Bruce to smile. 

Bruce had no idea who this man was supposed to be, but he smiled back faintly, because that seemed to be what Kal was expecting to happen. “No, uh, just… bringing this in to see if anyone could identify it.” 

“Oh! Are you one of the ones Atom and Blue Beetle are helping out?” Diana confirmed it before Bruce had to, and Kal continued. “Can I tag along? Glowing green is always  _ something _ .”

Bruce did not know that glowing green was always something, but nodded along all the same, because what was he going to do? ‘No, you can’t walk around your own satellite?’ 

(He was getting the feeling this was one of those ones who owned the satellite. He didn’t feel like Tony like he’d  _ owned  _ it owned it, but maybe sort of like Pepper, who had gotten so used to Tony’s extravagant buildings they hardly phased her, even before he’d settled down into something like humility in those last long years.)

Escorted by Kal and Diana to their little testing room, Bruce came in with the vial to find Natasha, Blue, and Atom busy half-heartedly marking off possible power spikes the computer had failed to cancel out. They’d clearly been doing it long enough that the new distraction latched on immediately. 

Blue Beetle escorted the whole big group back to the infirmary area, which branched off just a hallway over into an  _ actual  _ lab room, with several disparate tables with microscopes, swabs, and cold storage in the back. Along one wall was a larger computer arrangement, safely away from the safety shower near the door, where a pipette was shortly discovered and used to siphon out about 2 oz of the green liquid—still seeming to glow, even in such a small amount—and drip it onto one of several feed trays for analysis. 

“Even if we don’t have it in the database, we’ll still make a record of it in case it matches up to something else later,” Blue said, seeming very happy that they’d moved from basically paperwork to using machines and analyzing unknown substances. “Since it’s from a different world, that’ll probably be the case, so—“

Less than a minute after the computer first started analyzing, a result came up, cutting Blue Beetle off with a harsh ‘ _ Bzzng.’  _

‘Classified Substance,’ the computer read. ‘Alerting Admin.’

“...Hah?” Blue said, staring at the screen like it’d personally offended him. “But— if we already know it but it’s classified…?”

A few steps back, Kal and Diana started exchanging looks, while Natasha listened on in their quiet conversation. 

“I should probably head out,” Kal said. 

“You talked to him about Nightwing?” said Diana.

“Yeah, but he hasn’t really calmed down yet. Haven’t gotten him to say what’s got him so worked up this time. But I should probably go before he figures out how to make  _ actual  _ liquid kryptonite and tests it on me.”

“He won't,” she said, and pressed a hand on his shoulder. “Go socialize. I’ll let you know.” 

And then Kal was off, there one minute and gone the next, with only a light breeze left in his wake. 

“Does ‘Alerting Admin’ mean we’ve violated something…?” Bruce asked, pointing up at the screen again, which was, to be fair, a threatening red. 

“No, no, it's not like that,” Atom said. “Sometimes you do just run up into searches that only a handful of people are safe to know about, though, which is why Beetle’s mad.” 

He was grinning a little, actually, as he said that. 

“I’m not  _ mad _ ,” Beetle said. 

“He’s  _ grumpy _ ,” Atom corrected himself. “Because that means now we have to share the project with Batman.” 

—

“It’s Lazarus Water,” Batman said, frowning. He handled the vial with pincers even though he was already wearing heavy-duty looking gloves, as if it were caustic. 

They had been moved once more into a part of the satellite that Bruce hadn’t seen before, and from her expression, neither had Natasha. It had looked like a closet door or perhaps a small offshoot hallway in the medical lab, but it was longer on the other side than appearances had seemed, moving perpendicular to where they had been walking in a loop before. 

The satellite had interior rings. 

...if Bruce had to guess, the closer to the interior you went, the closer to the heart of the operation. Probably. That was how he’d design a secret satellite. Not that they were  _ trying  _ to infiltrate this place, but— it was hard for him to not wonder how many rings there were going inwards. What things might be at the center of the operation, when what was here, on the second level— 

Well. 

It was a full… laboratory. 

It was maybe even more of a lab than he’d seen in years. Tony’s labs had… well. They’d been engineering stations, really. Which wasn’t incorrect, but Bruce always had a bit of a divide in his mind in the areas that  _ used  _ lasers versus the places that  _ built  _ them, for example. 

This, not-literally (as far as he knew), was a place that  _ used  _ lasers. 

There were centrifuges and cabinets of labeled substances too small to read from outside, two full industrial sinks, more basins than that, and an emergency shower and eyewash station. 

There were hair nets, protective goggles, and a defibrillator by the door.

There were _XXL_ _latex-free gloves._

The whole room smelled faintly of bleach and it was a strangely wonderful place for Bruce to find himself in. Enough so that for a moment he was almost distracted from the reason they’d come in the first place. 

“What is Lazarus Water?” Natasha asked, foregoing looking around the lab to instead find the nearest wall and stand with her back towards it, arms crossed and watching as Batman piped a few drops out of the vial and onto a microscope slide.

“It is a corruptive substance that promotes healing while eating away at mental facilities.” 

“It’s unicorn blood,” said Blue Beetle, having taken over the door frame once Atom squeezed in. 

“What?” Said Bruce. 

“You know,” Blue Beetle said, and waved his hand in explanation. “Unicorn blood? From Harry Potter?” 

“‘You will have but a  _ half  _ life,’” Atom said, adopting a bit of a menacing, breathy voice and wiggling his fingers menacingly. “‘a  _ cursed  _ life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.’”

“Please don’t tell me unicorns are real,” Bruce said, feeling faint. 

He really hated how the two heroes glanced at each other before responding. 

“Probably on Themyscira,” said Blue Beetle. 

“Probably,” agreed Atom, “So for practical purposes, no. No unicorns.” 

“Damn,” said Natasha. “So the fake unicorn blood is a… bad medicine.”

“It’s a preternatural phenomenon named for the revival of Lazarus from the Bible,” Batman said, ignoring the others, instead looking under the microscope at the droplets. “If you submerge in the water, just about any injuries or illnesses you have will be cured, but you will also go into a fairly violent rage and be dangerously unstable for a while, depending on the extent of the previous damage. Corruptive.”

Natasha was still frowning pretty pronouncedly. 

Bruce, for his part, was somewhat thinking of the size of the tank the sample had come from. 

He was also thinking of… well. 

Green.

Of being frightened, or injured, and panicking, and the world dissolving in green and unstable violence. Some of that had been rage. They’d called him the big green rage machine. 

But a lot of it had been violence born from fear. The savagery of a cornered animal, lashing out protectively. He understood that now. He understood that for a long time, Hulk had not just been under assault from General Ross and whatever violence came from the outside world, but also from the Bruce personality that had wanted Hulk gone or either of them dead for so long. 

(When Bruce had tried to kill himself, he’d said  _ it wont let me die.  _ But really, it would’ve been killing Hulk, too. Hulk didn’t want to be murdered. It was a lot of bad ‘split personality’ fiction, but Bruce hadn’t realized he was the ‘dangerous’ side that kept Hulk waking up in danger. )

...they’d worked a lot of things out, since then. They’d figured out their system. And yet—

Bruce thought he understood now what Kal had meant when he said ‘green was always something.’ 

Batman was explaining something else of Natasha’s questions, something about how it hadn’t been invented and no there wasn’t a cure, no, it didn’t conduct a current like regular water, some radiation yes, but nothing lethal—

Bruce felt his hands grow and shrink, just a little bit. Like his muscles had to resettle in their skin. 

He wasn’t  _ afraid _ . Not that anyone would lose control, or that even if Hulk fully surfaced that they would be in any danger (which was  _ so much better  _ than it’d been when he was afraid of a helicarrier, now they were in  _ space _ —) but he just… 

“I’m gonna… bow out for a few minutes,” Bruce said, and Natasha’s head snapped towards him so sharply it was hard to not find it accusatory. “I’m not feeling my best. Probably just blood sugar, I’ll… be back soon.” 

He ducked his head, which did nothing since he was still a good foot taller than anyone in the room, and pushed between Atom and Blue Beetle to escape. They offered no resistance, though he thought maybe Atom called after him to ask if he needed an escort. 

Bruce just moved down the hall as soon as he could and back into the medical hall, and didn’t look back. 

…

He was the ‘scientist’ of their group now, he guessed. And he’d just run out of the science part of this whole… thing. 

...but Natasha would be fine. He could ask questions later. She’d know plenty of what to ask anyway. 

...with nowhere else to go, he did indeed start making his way towards the cafeteria. Maybe he really did just need food, or more likely some water.

The loop passed in a blur, but by the time he reached the cafeteria, holding his elbows in his hands and squeezing had stopped most of the uncomfortable twitches and spasms in his arms. 

The cafeteria was noticeably more empty than when he’d last been in. He guessed even in space there was rush hour. 

He got water and a sleeve of saltines, and sat down at an empty table to try and calm his stomach. 

He couldn’t have been there for very long before he was interrupted by another figure sitting across from him, and sliding an opened box of double stuf oreos into his eating space. 

Bruce looked up in confusion, to find the person sitting in the other seat was him. The only other green person on this satellite, who Natasha had said meant green skin was probably normal around here. 

“Hello,” the alien said. He was almost as tall as Bruce, but sitting put them on the exact same level, and his eyes glowed a dull red. “I’m sorry to intrude, but you seemed like you were distressed. I thought something sweeter might help.” 

Bruce looked down again at the packet of double stuf oreos, then back up to the tall green alien wearing nothing but a blue fake-looking cape and an expression completely sincere.

This, of all things, brought all the sense of unreality falling down on him. He started to laugh. 

The alien smiled in response, and offered out a hand with fingers almost perfectly human-fingers long. 

“I am J’onn J’onz of Mars,” he said. 

Covering his mouth to stifle his laughs, Bruce took the offered hand with his other. “Bruce Banner. Haha— I’m sorry, I’ve just— heuh — it’s been a long day.” 

J’onn released their handshake and just… smiled gently. He took an oreo from the packet, and twisted the top cookie off in preparation to eat the icing. 

“Would you like to tell me about it?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> too much shit in the world today to keep up  
> wash ur hands even if you've been wearing gloves and sanitizer  
> care for living things first, and objects second


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hardest part of living is the waiting

...Natasha had stayed very professional, she thought. She watched Bruce flee the room, answered the questioning glances of Atom and Blue Beetle with “blood sugar,” and remained very calm and giving no appearance that anything may have potentially been wrong. 

Because potentially nothing  _ was  _ wrong. Perhaps Bruce really was feeling a little low on blood sugar— keeping track of how much they were eating was getting confusing between worlds. And if not, then Bruce was hopefully making a decision he was informed of and she should trust his judgement. They were partners in this. 

They were partners in this. 

…

(And yet she couldn’t stop thinking that the worst part about partners was that one day they would throw themselves off a cliff to let you live without them.) 

...so she would definitely not cut any of her questions short, or forget things she meant to ask in a mixed-up worry, or anything like that. She would put a post-it on this conversation, so that when Bruce was better they could come back and ask more if they needed to. Because she wasn’t the radiation scientist. She was the muscle, here, and—

Well. She got the jist of Lazarus water and a copy of some of its recognizable traits to send back to her world and see if any known matches could be picked up, maybe, and then she said a soft ‘be back soon’ knowing that it would be a longer time for her than it would for them, and…. 

She left the lab. Back out through the corridor to the medical wing. From the medical wing, she would be able to go two directions. 

One towards the cafeteria, where Bruce presumably was. 

The other direction would take her to the teleporters. 

There was a decision to make, which way to go. On one hand, this information should probably get back to Pepper and give them some time to research and see if there was anything new they could find out now that the knew more of the characteristics of the water. There  _ would  _ have to be time for that; their perspective didn’t turn when they weren’t in their home universes. Whatever made Bruce hurry out, it would still be perfectly fresh by the time she returned with more information. 

...but if she went to check on Bruce first, she would still reach Pepper just as fast, and take just as much time to find things, and maybe Bruce had even realized something that would be important. Or dangerous. It hadn’t  _ looked  _ like the expression of a man realizing mortal danger she didn’t think. 

But really, the calm and confident expressions that had been Bruce’d lately were a lot more foreign to her than the anxiety and discomfort he’d been in years ago when they’d all first met. No, it hadn’t really seemed like those either, she guessed, but… 

Both things would wait. They’d both still be here when she returned, regardless how look it took. Time wasn’t, in fact, an issue here. So it was fully in her discretion to pick which direction to take first. 

Back with Clint, Natasha knew exactly what her decision would’ve been. Easy. No guilt. 

...but Bruce wasn’t Clint, and there were only so many things she could worry about at once. 

Natasha turned and walked towards the teleporters. 

—

There had been some logistics in everything. Pepper and Tony’s house was in California, but the travel array that still functioned enough to be modified was in New York. Natasha could easily call across the country to relay information, but even if Pepper sent a vial of strange water to New York as fast as she could (four hours), Natasha still had to arrive to wait it out. 

Just as Natasha reappeared at the minute she’d left, she also reappeared in the same place. This made it convenient to know that she could arrive behind Diana’s teleported shack fairly consistently. It was less convenient that she couldn’t arbitrarily decide to arrive on the west coast. But it was what it was. 

Sam lived closest to the New York teleport, so that was where she’d been returning rather than her own house, which was currently being watched over by some of Pepper’s hired hands and a sweet neighbor. 

Sam’s place was… where Steve had once lived, actually. While in the aftermath of the Snap no one had _really_ legally removed property holdings from the dead, as sorting out the overwhelming deaths without wills, for the majority of the world, a blanket removal of property was simply not the priority. So there had been looting in the panic. There had been property damage, even if just from years of no one living in the houses and giving them upkeep. A lot of the time, it was just someone frantically breaking down doors on their street, trying to prevent pets being trapped inside. 

Between being un-Snapped into a surprise battle and Steve’s ‘departure’... Sam hadn’t exactly had much time to see what his old house looked like anymore. They’d settled into the rental, shown around for a few days by an older man who seemed both too much like the young man they’d known and a completely different person. 

About a month in, Steve had started using a crutch, and stopped speaking as much. 

It had gone downhill from there very fast. 

It really shouldn’t have been like that. Bucky had said as much before falling into a long silence lasting the good first month that Steve was in the nursing home. No one really had the heart to put forth theories aloud. If Tony were still here, he would’ve been the one to do that— maybe his super serum just had a fun expiration date; maybe it didn’t affect the brain the same way it affected his muscles; maybe Steve had held on long enough to see his friends again and then had his body give out beneath him. 

Maybe knowing that Bucky and his super hearing were just a few thin walls away was what made a sour taste in her mouth as she reported in to Pepper on the other side of the country. 

“So like the fountain of youth?” Pepper asked over the call, her hologram frowning on top of the kitchen table. 

“Sure,” Natasha said, tossing her hands up, because it seemed apt enough. “Mysterious rejuvenative liquid. Guess the worst legends still had to come from somewhere.”

“But Tony would’ve made note of that if he had access to it,” Pepper said, frown completely undisturbed. “If he’s… if he’d had it as long as we think, then he’d have at least started making  _ something  _ with it. Even just a skin care product.”

“Maybe he didn’t know what he was working with,” Natasha said, not really believing it. Why would Tony keep a tank of the stuff if he didn’t know it was  _ something _ , after all?

Pepper echoed her thoughts. “No, he would’ve known something was up if he went to the trouble of having that setup and  _ hidden _ . He would’ve complained to me about it at the very least, surely, if he was having trouble with what looked like just… water…” 

But he hadn’t. And in that, everything fell apart. You couldn’t read the intentions of the dead. 

Natasha sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “Did you get the notes I sent?” 

“Yeah,” Pepper reached around behind her camera and pulled out the handful of notes Natasha had scribbled down as soon as she could to keep the details as clear as possible. “I’ll look over them and maybe I can talk to Hank and Janet and see if they can come up with anything. You doing alright over there?” 

“Yeah, fine. Just getting tired of doing double days.” said Natasha. She ran her hand through her hair again. For her, it felt like a week had passed, even though ‘technically’ it had only been about three days.

Pepper laughed politely. “Get some rest. We’ll let you know if anything comes up.” 

In the distance, Natasha heard Sam walking around the house, heading over towards Bucky’s room. Today was visit day, she guessed. She could probably force a nap while they were out. 

“Yeah, I will.” 

“Okay. I’ll talk to you later, then. Morgan, honey, do you wanna go visit the ants?”

As Pepper turned from the screen, the hologram zipped away, and the call had ended. 

She could still hear some shuffling of boots and one-person mumbling. 

Natasha closed her eyes and tried to not think about what situation Bruce might end up being in when she went back. 

She’d stay in the kitchen until Sam and Bucky finally headed out, and then make her way to the guest room, and get some sleep. 

— 

Bucky had not exactly changed a whole lot in the intervening few days. At most, he’d picked up some of his tactical knives and stolen a bar of soap from the bathroom, and started carving it into a boat. 

This was not the worst thing to happen, even though it did mean his bed was covered in soap shavings, and the vacuum didn’t like picking them up. It also meant that when Bucky finally got up, he too was covered in soap shavings. 

At least he’d smell nice and floral for the nursing home, Sam figured, and hauled him out. 

  


It was the same nursing home Peggy had been in. They specialized in veterans, and, well… it was hard to not be more veteran than Steve, he guessed, even if Steve’s total service all counted out would be less than a decade. Unless he’d done something in the past to add on a few years. 

But he couldn’t have. That wasn’t how the time travel worked. They knew that. 

(Bucky knew that. And as much of a handful as Bucky could be and how often Sam was really questioning some of his life choices, it was hard to hate a guy who lived with knowing his best friend had time traveled to the past and then  _ not  _ gone to Hydra’s core and ripped him from their scientists one more time.) 

Steve had a private room he spent most of their visits in. Apparently he did get up and do things like play checkers with some of the other residents, but not when Sam and Bucky were coming by. 

To be fair, it probably did made it easier for them to have a bed available for Bucky to just hover over or curl up on for the next six hours. 

Because that was generally how their visits went. 

Drop off. Talk to Steve a bit. 

And let Bucky just hover there until visiting hours were over and they pried him out again. 

Steve never really said anything about it. It rubbed Sam the wrong way a little bit, honestly— at some point, way back when they were on the run from the international police and Bucky was refrozen in Wakanda, Steve had told Sam how he’d first found Bucky back in Bucharest, hiding out in a clean apartment and going out to buy some fruit.

Sam knew he’d been spending too much time in DC when the mental image of the winter solider buying dates made him think about yoga moms and living off cleanses. 

But that Bucky in Romania had gotten there all the way from DC, got an apartment and clothes and grocery list, money to buy those groceries with— 

It just seemed like a far and away person from the exhausted body that lived in Sam’s little guest room. And he was pretty sure it wasn’t getting any better. 

But Sam also wasn’t the kind of person who could abandon someone like that. 

So he got Bucky in the car and stared at him in the mirror until he put his fucking seatbelt on. And they drove twenty agonizing minutes through traffic to reach the retirement home and sign in. 

It was protected by low walls and a flower bed out front, and a bit of an orchard in the back to allow some of the patients to relax outside somewhere. A nice place. 

They moved passed the big common area where there were a few groups watching tv and another handful playing pool while an orderly kept watch, and down a different wide hall with full railings, they were in some of the private sectors. 

Steve was reading a book when they came in, sitting in an armchair beside his bed and with his cane leaning up against the wall behind him. 

He looked up and smiled at them as they passed through the threshold, closing the book and setting it down on his lap. 

“Hey, Buck. Sam.” 

“Hey,” Bucky said in a cracked voice. 

“Just dropping in again,” Sam said. “Still being treated okay?” 

“Oh, yeah. The people here are the best,” Steve said, and held out a hand to help guide Bucky to sit down on the edge of his nearby bed. “You all doing okay? Nothing too exciting so far?” 

“I think you’d have heard it if things had gotten exciting,” Sam said. “New York’s just outside, you know.” 

“I dunno, maybe we finally figured out being discreet,” he said with a wink. 

Bucky didn’t laugh at that. Sam just gave an acknowledging nod. 

(This man was Steve Rogers. But he had white hair, and sagging skin, and for a man of one hundred and six he was downright hale. Yet even though they’d gotten used to that new appearance, it was still hard to  _ feel  _ sometimes that this man was their Steve. Even if all the words were alike, and it was the right face, and it was the right name. Surely, someone could change a lot in seventy years. But it wasn’t like Sam had lived those seventy years right alongside him, seeing the changes as they came along the way.

...but maybe Steve was too much like he’d been seventy years ago. Maybe it would’ve been easier if he’d come back talking about how he‘d vacationed on the red beaches of the USSR, had caught the first ever Star Wars showing, had watched the Berlin Wall fall down. But he didn’t. 

Maybe he thought it was making it easier on Bucky. It wasn’t. Sam had a hard time even ribbing the kid to go get properly groomed sometimes.)

(If anyone deserved to live out a full life, of course Steve was on the list. But had living out a full life here really been that awful a prospect? No one else got to choose the times they struggled through. ) 

“You kids don’t do anything stupid, now; I’m goin’a see what we might be able to get for lunch,” said Sam, pointing at Bucky and Steve as if they were two dumbass teenagers instead of grown ass traumatized adults. But Steve waved and said ‘see you soon’, unbothered, and Bucky just scowled a little deeper at him, and Sam headed back out the door, passing one of the orderlies waiting in the hall. 

A couple steps out, he felt something whiff just over the surface of his buzz cut and something  _ wet _ touched the rim of his ear. 

When his arm jerked up and found a wrist in the culprit area he didn’t exactly hesitate to grab it and throw the body attached over his shoulder and into the wall. 

The orderly hit upside down into the wall with a shout, his shoulder looking like it’d taken the brunt of it.  _ And fuck.  _ Sam smacked whatever wet thing had been put on him off, and something gooey and wet splatting onto the floor by his feet. 

“Ugh! What the hell?” 

There was the trotting of feet as orderlies and some aware patients got up to see the commotion, and Sam didn’t glance back to make sure Steve and Bucky were looking, because they wouldn’t leave him to do a ‘my-word-against-his’ thing by now with a young white orderly who’d done either the worst prank in the world or was an idiot with a shitty sense of humor. 

“You putting a  _ slug  _ in my  _ ear? _ ” he said, very aware of the witnesses as he got down to righten the stupid asshole, who winced as his arm was touched. “Yeah, I bet it does hurt! Some people don’t do great with weird shit being pushed in their ears!” 

(No one was stepping forward talking about calling the cops or angrily demanding an explanation, so he was feeling a little bit better about things as he pulled the kid up by his shirt and gave him a bit of a push away. Asshole stumbled away as if the shove had hurt, too.) 

“Jesus,” he said, not wanting to lodge a formal complaint and yet also extremely hoping this spectacle would get asshole young adults fired. “Someone’s gotta mop here now.” 

...there was a bit more hubbub as the orderly ran off into the main room holding his arm and presumably going off to get some first aid, while someone else sighed and headed towards a utility closet. 

A few of the seniors chuffed and headed off, talking with each other, and the other handful of orderlies who’d gathered sort of… nodded a bit and wandered off without a word. 

Without a word. 

…

Sam wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

He wiped his ear again, just to get that cold, wet feeling off it, and glanced back at the doorway. 

Steve and Bucky were indeed in the doorframe, watching quietly. 

They didn’t say anything either. 

…

Sam shuffled side to side a little bit, shook it off, and walked away. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 👀


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come on my baby come on my honey let me finish this fic
> 
> I know what’s going to happen but am very much intimidated by the OH NO HOW DO I GET THERE

Bruce didn’t even notice Natasha standing behind him before J’onn waved over his shoulder and said, “Welcome.” 

“Oh!” Bruce said, turning around to look at her. Her clothes were different than they’d been earlier that day, so maybe it’d been a bit longer a break for her than it had been for him. “Hey. Find anything?”

“Nothing I can spot,” she said, and put a hand on his big green shoulder. “How are you doing?” 

“Hm?” 

“You ran out of the meeting.” 

“Oh!” Embarrassment came rushing back to him. “Oh, uh, yeah… I’m fine. Just wanted some room, haha. Have you met J’onn? He’s  _ psychic. _ ” 

J’onn, still waiting patiently, raised his hand again to wave, smiling a little at Bruce’s enthusiasm. As always, Natasha wanted a few more details before being impressed herself. 

“Oh?” She said, removing her hand from Bruce’s shoulder to put it on her hip. “You make things float, or you predict the future?” 

It didn’t really make a dent in J’onn’s composure. Through the hour or so they’d been sitting together, they’d amassed a few more plates of food on the table, and slowly one began to rise up into the air without being touched or wobbling around. “All martians have similar abilities. It is a biological facet more than an ability. But the future is not revealed to anyone.” 

“Martians,” Natasha said. 

Bruce was more busy moving his hand underneath the floating plate, smacking away nonexistent trick wires. “See? I have no idea how he’s doing it! I can’t feel any force around it, and there’s no noticeable heat change or anything that seems to be acting on it. It’s like it literally just stopped noticing gravity but it’s not even free floating, it’s steady in the air!” 

“Ah,” Natasha said. Bruce was fine. He had revived his inner nerd. She felt a bit less bad about leaving him. She took a seat by Bruce and picked up an oreo off a non-floating plate. “No mind reading?” 

J’onn tilted his head to the side. “That would be inappropriate,” he said, which was honestly the most ominous answer he could’ve given as far as Natasha was concerned. She managed to not choke on the cookie. 

“Oh,” she coughed, “Huh.” 

The floating plate slid steadily into Bruce’s waiting hand, and he set it down on his own while J’onn looked over with concern. “Do you need a drink?” 

He would get up and fetch a glass of water a moment or so later, once Natasha shrugged. While he was up, Bruce glanced over. “You okay?” 

“Was the mind reading a joke?” Natasha asked. The cookie had been a mistake and the ‘chocolate’ dust was chalky in her mouth. 

“Uh. I hadn’t asked.” 

Not for the last time, Natasha wondered which of them was  _ really _ the one more used to dealing with aliens. Maybe Bruce was more used to them, but honestly, Natasha was pretty sure that meant he let his guard down way too much. 

“Never mind, then. You’ll look over my notes to see if you can find anything weird?” 

“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” 

Bruce moved some of the plates aside, and took the folded papers of notes Natasha had written up for Pepper, and started to read. 

—

_ Bruce?  _

J’onn J’onzz did not need to read minds to understand distress. 

Earthlings and the aliens they attracted tended to have the same sorts of emotional spectrum as martians once did. It was comforting, in a way. As much as one could call sharing relative psyche traits with another species could be comforting. But J’onn felt it was comforting, and that if they really thought about it most of his compatriots would agree. After all, one could vent to a pet cat all afternoon, which would be understandable, but it would not be quite as effective as venting to someone who you knew for a fact had the same emotions as you, and who could physicalize and verbalize them the same. Cats could not cry, for example: they simply got eye infections, and though the instincts to care and show affection were similar, a cat could not recognize crying as distress without being trained. A cat could not instinctively understand a smile as affection, anymore than a human would identify a chimpanzee smiling as a threat. 

J’onn did understand these things. And though his humanoid friends sometimes needed a moment to tell, as J’onn’s voice wasn’t always expressive in the same way theirs were, to smile and to cry and to comfort? These emotions, they matched up just the same. 

He did not have to read minds to understand the anxiety in Superman’s face as he looked down at the communicator in his hands. 

J’onn set the water down at his table with the two visitors and excused himself to go towards the entryway of the cafeteria, where Superman had apparently walked in and immediately stopped to fret in place. 

“Is everything alright?” asked J’onn in lieu of a greeting. It seemed more important. 

“Huh?” Superman glanced up at him, and then back down at the little communicator— as cellphones were unreliable in space, they used the little objects to speak instead. “Oh, uh. Yeah. Probably.” 

“Probably?” J’onn said. 

Superman let out a deep sigh, and put the communicator in a mysterious pocket J’onn had yet to identify on Superman’s otherwise very tight suit. “Yeah, just. Batman got injured and won’t come up because of it but he swears it’s not a big deal.” 

“ _ Ah, _ ” J’onn said, nodding. He had dealt with a lot of Batman’s ‘not a big deal’ injuries in the medical bay, and he could think of a couple things besides ‘ah’ that might be appropriate to say about them. “What was he doing last night?” 

“I don’t know,” Superman said, frowning, but in a sad way much more than an angry way. “Another covert thing, probably. I don’t keep that close track or he gets paranoid. But nothing big enough to make news and I didn’t hear about any arrests, so…? I don’t know.” 

“...” J’onn watched him lean against the wall sullenly. “Would you like to go check on him.” 

“...Yes.” 

J’onn put a hand on his shoulder. “Then let’s go. You can say I insisted this time.” 

Superman gave him a grateful smile and put a warm, warm hand on top of J’onn’s on his shoulder. “Thanks.” 

— 

As Natasha made her way back towards the transporter room to debate her comings and goings, the announcement for arrivals sounded from above. Instinct, more than intent, made her go still and keep out of the room, hidden as out of sight as she could be, and listening. 

This is the conversation she heard:

A prolonged moment of silence, first. Then, “I think there’s something wrong here.”

That was the voice she recognized as one of the three ‘leaders’ here, Superman. It was what made her decide that staying and hiding was indeed the correct instinct to follow. 

“Why do you say so?” That voice took her longer to place. But she would, by the end of a few sentences. The alien from lunch. J’onn. “I don’t disagree, yet I have trouble saying exactly why I feel uneasy.”

“Because there’s no  _ way  _ he bit his tongue,” said Superman. “Have you met Batman? I think half his teeth are fake at this point, but he’s got a mouth guard or weird tongue ninja training so he doesn’t bite through it when, you know, he decides to fight Darkseid on his own or something.” 

This must have been a joke, because J’onn let out a chuckle, even if it sounded a bit flat, even for someone who didn’t speak with much emotion to start with. 

“It is certainly unusual, and I would not have thought a bite would stop him from a meeting.”

“Yeah. Exactly. So… something’s up and he’s hiding it from us again.” 

“You are thinking of something very intrusive, aren’t you.” 

“...I mean, yeah. But with the kind of secrets he keeps, can you really blame me?” 

“Probably not,” said J’onn. “But I think it would be best to have some backup on hand, just in case.” 

“Hah. Yeah. As soon as I start to pry, he’ll pull out the kryptonite again, won’t he?” 

“You’d best do this in the Watchtower. He will avoid collateral damage up here.”

“Oof. Yeah. Find me waking up again in the cold void of space. Can’t believe I’m talking about my best friend.”

“You do provoke him.” 

“I do not!”

“ _ I  _ discuss detective novels with him. Our mutual monitor hours are very enjoyable times.” 

“....that’s cunning, John. Cunning, and unfair. Not sure if you should stay away to avoid getting on the punch-friend list, or if I want you there to save me.”

—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Now is probably the time to start looking over those warning tags again.**

**Author's Note:**

> i am here to ruin everything for everyone, hello
> 
> i swear to god i'm working on the last Roadtrip Vigilantes chapter but first i had to get started on this disaster because do you _know_ how wack I can get with these universes once I stop caring? do you _know_ how hard to resist temptation that is?


End file.
